Introduction the Arts and Crafts Movement, Work Cultures, and The

Home , 7 Hammersmith Terrace, Arts and Crafts movement, Leighton House Museum, Selwyn Image, William Morris Gallery

Introduction Th e Arts and Craft s movement, work cultures, and the politics of gender

n London today there survive countless buildings which function as important architectural symbols of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- I century artistic culture. Th ere is the Art Workers’ Guild’ s purpose-built Hall at 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, which, to this day, houses meetings for ‘craft speople and architects working at the highest levels of excellence in their professions’.1 Th e Hall has a rich history: it is the place where the most prestigious men associated with the Arts and Craft s movement met, in reaction to the domineering presence of the Royal Academy, to forge new bonds of brotherly comradeship and concoct radical ideas about how to reform society through the arts. Th e walls are lined with paintings and sculptures depicting eminent past members such as architect W. R. Lethaby, and artists Selwyn Image, Walter Crane, and C. R. Ashbee. In West London, there is St Paul’ s Studios, a row of purpose-built red-brick studios with colossal glass windows, a testament to the extensive growth of such buildings in this artistic area of the city in the late nineteenth century. Th is street was designed in 1891 for use by ‘bachelor’ artists; today these famed sites provide homes for millionaires. Elsewhere in Hammersmith there is Kelmscott House, once home to socialist designer and poet William Morris; the William Morris Society are now encamped in the coach house and basement rooms, ensuring his name is not forgotten. A short stroll down the river, at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, is the engraver and printer Emery Walker’ s home. It is open to the public, and visitors can view historical rooms with Morris & Co. wallpaper and furniture by Philip Webb, and can even peer into a drawer containing a lock of William Morris’ s hair. In books, walking tours, and exhibition catalogues, these buildings – the Hall, St Paul ’ s Studios, Morris ’ s and Walker ’ s homes, alongside buildings such as the painter Frederic Leighton ’ s Kensington studio home (now the Leighton House Museum, resplendent with English Heritage blue plaque) – are all used as cultural anchor points through which to construct a history framed around the centrality of exceptional male fi gures to the modern art scene. But these buildings hide secrets. During this era, a vast network of artistic women working in the capital and across the country were active participants in this culture. Women art workers formed their own exclusive

1 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT guild – the Women’ s Guild of Arts – and met at the same Hall for over fi ft y years. Th ey organised lectures, exhibitions, demonstrations, and parties at their businesses, workshops, homes, exhibition venues, and studios, which included various properties at St Paul ’ s Studios, and several houses on the banks of the river in Hammersmith. At these premises, art was designed and made – from bookcases, to stained-glass windows, necklaces, and chess sets – which was sent to customers around the world. Women art workers played a critical role in disseminating the Arts and Craft s ethos of the social importance of the arts across new local, national, and international spheres of infl uence, and simultaneously altering that same ethos to be more receptive to public interest in domestic consumerism. By the dawn of the twentieth century they had grown in confi dence in promoting their own vision of the movement. Th is focused less on an idealistic rhetoric of demolishing class hierarchies and more on a pragmatic cultivation of the public obsession with obtaining ‘artistic’ and ‘historic’ objects for the home. But this was not a rejection of the political: this new conception of the Arts and Craft s redirected the radical potential of art work into contemporary women-centred causes. Women Art Workers foregrounds these buildings, spaces, and the relationships that played out within these sites. In so doing, it off ers unprecedented insight into how women, working across the arts, constructed creative lives and sought to overturn imbalances of cultural, social, political, and gendered power. Th ese women were agents of change who shaped a range of skilled work cultures (artistic, professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial, commercial) at a critical juncture and encouraged new ideas to spread across society about gender relations, organisational cultures, family life, and the meaning of equality. Challenging the long- standing assumption that the movement simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris and his circle, this book off ers a new social and cultural history of the English Arts and Craft s movement which reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of the modern world.

A new history of the Arts and Craft s movement Across the nineteenth century, fear about the damaging eff ects of indus- trialisation, urbanisation, and mass consumption on social conditions and culture became increasingly prevalent. In an era of growing international competitiveness, many felt that England’ s decorative art tradition repre- sented the state of its society to a watchful global audience. By the 1870s and 1880s concerns became more urgent. An army of architects, artists, 2 INTRODUCTION

and writers grew convinced of the need to take inspiration from the medieval past and to design and create art which could temper the ills of the modern world. Art critic John Ruskin was one particularly infl uential fi gure, who lamented the deterioration of diff erent processes of design and making, so that objects could be quickly and cheaply produced by unskilled labourers. He positioned the arts as off ering participants the chance to cultivate a greater sense of personal authenticity in a rapidly changing world. Authenticity was ill-defi ned and devoid of fi xed meaning, but in these artistic circles was loosely articulated as eschewing commercial trends, embracing the natural world, respecting materials, and working collaboratively, across the production process. Th ere was a concentration of interest in overturning the hierarchy in the arts which had – since the Renaissance – prioritised the ‘High Arts’ of architecture, painting, and sculpture above the so-called ‘minor’ decorative arts. Th is growth of interest in fi nding artistic alternatives to industrial manufacturing was matched by a fl ood of consumer desire to purchase suitably artistic and historic objects for the home, as the middle classes expanded and sought to show off their new cultured statuses to the rest of society. 2 Th e 1880s constituted a formative decade in the making of the movement.3 Th e Art Workers’ Guild and the Home Arts and Industries Associa- tion were established in 1884, followed by the Arts and Craft s Exhibition Society, which was established in 1887 and held its fi rst exhibition in 1888. Th e Home Arts and Industries Association functioned as an umbrella organisation for craft -based industries across the country. Framed around educating working-class individuals of the benefi ts of the craft s, it has attracted a reputation as the amateur outer sphere of the movement, even though it played a critical role in encouraging greater societal engagement with handcraft ed cultures. 4 Th e formation of the Exhibition Society, the point at which the phrase ‘Arts and Craft s’ was coined, provided important new exhibition opportunities for the women and men whose work was deemed of high enough quality. By contrast, the Art Workers’ Guild, which remained male-only until 1964, cultivated an intensely private club-like environment for distinguished male architects and designers. Together these three groups are heralded as forming the tripartite institutional representation of the English Arts and Craft s movement. Histories of the movement routinely construct narratives framed around biographies of celebrated fi gures such as William Morris and C. R. Ashbee, and their altruistic, politicised, and creative attempts to overturn traditional class hierarchies by forging cross-class bonds between diff erent men, in particular between labourers and architects and designers.5

3 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

Ashbee formed his Guild of Handicraft in the East End in 1888 to put into practice his desire to provide opportunities for working-class men to take joy in processes of making in the workshop, instead of toiling away in capitalist factories. Yet despite radical intentions, oft en because of the costs involved, these men spent much of their time producing work for upper-middle-class and upper-class customers, facilitating the very process they sought to reverse.6 Morris and Ashbee were both members of the Art Workers’ Guild, a group which exemplifi es the class hierarchies which permeated the movement. One had to be an architect or designer (not simply a maker) to gain entry, many members were already friends, and the relationships formalised there fortifi ed a pervasive model of elite artistic masculinity well into the twentieth century. Th e Art Workers’ Guild is oft en used as a barometer for measuring the cultural signifi cance of diff erent artists to the movement. Art historian Alan Crawford, amongst others, has positioned the Guild as having the atmosphere ‘of a slightly Bohemian gentleman ’ s club, smoky and exclusive. It was the most important single organisation in the Movement, and in some ways its heart.’ಟ7 Th ose who did not gain access in its heyday tend to be viewed as suspicious dilettante outliers, or simply ignored, part of the ongoing tendency to position privileged male individuals and male-only institutions as uniformly appreciated symbols of expertise and disseminators of cultural knowledge. Figures such as Morris clearly were infl uential – those around him repeatedly venerated his role as ‘artistic godfather’ – but this ongoing fi xation with such individuals has distorted the understanding of the movement ’ s long-term social and cultural impact. In contrast to the interest in class relations, scholarship using gender as a critical lens of inquiry to understand the Arts and Craft s has been notably limited. Th e single monograph on women in the movement remains Anthea Callen ’ s 1979 Angel in the Studio , part of a mass of valuable second-wave feminist scholarship which sought to uncover the ‘hidden’ lives of women across history. Callen, drawing predominantly from periodicals, journals, and advice literature relating to the years 1860–1900, alongside texts oft en written by members of the Art Workers’ Guild, concluded that the movement ultimately perpetuated prevalent patriarchal hierarchies and failed to alter wider social conceptions of the relationship between middle-class women and work.8 Lynne Walker provided an important counter to this in an 1989 book chapter, suggesting that ‘instead of further alienating women, the Arts and Craft s Movement provided women with alternative roles, institutions, and structures which they then used as active agents in their own history’. 9 Despite the emergence of

4 INTRODUCTION scholarship convincingly emphasising the signifi cance of women in the Scottish, Irish, Canadian, and North American Arts and Craft s movements, and a wealth of feminist scholarship which has unveiled the centrality of women ’ s artistic outputs in the making of the modern art world more widely, histories of the English movement have continued to ignore the contributions of women, or relegate them to a single page. 10 A small cluster of books and exhibitions have provided a productive biographical lens onto the lives and works of individual ‘exceptional’ Arts and Craft s women – whose relevance can be ascertained through their close association by marriage or kin to celebrated men, such as embroidery designer and jeweller May Morris, daughter of William Morris.11 Th ese accounts off er important insights, but they can be emblematic of older art historical approaches to the canon, tending to be framed around notions of individual exceptionality. Currently, we are reliant on these narratives to understand women ’ s involvement in the movement, but such an approach sits uneasily within this specifi c historical context. Th ose involved in the Arts and Craft s, in their ideals at least, oft en sought to break down such hierarchical notions of individual exceptionality, channelling great energies into forming informal and formal collaborations to augment their commitment to the Arts and Craft s. In this book, I off er a new history of the Arts and Craft s movement which moves beyond the tendency to construct a narrative through the perspectives of one or two celebrated individual designers, to instead position the extensive network of women working at the highest echelons of the English Arts and Craft s movement at the centre of the analysis for the fi rst time. My ‘cast’ comprises many women who are today practically unknown, alongside a small number of better-known fi gures. Th ey include, among others: stained-glass designer Mary Lowndes; metalworker E. C. (Ellen Caroline) Woodward and her sister the illustrator Alice B. (Boling- broke) Woodward; painter and enameller Edith B. (Brearey) Dawson ( née Robinson); muralist Mary Sargant Florence (née Sargant); sculptor Feodora Gleichen; painter and folklorist Estella Canziani; textile designer and jeweller May Morris; illustrator and toy designer M. V. (Mary Vermuyden) Wheelhouse; ‘artistic’ goldsmith Charlotte Newman (née Gibbs); wood- worker Julia Bowley ( née Hilliam); weaver Annie Garnett; and illustrator and designer Pamela Colman Smith. Th e central thread connecting these women is that they were all founding or early members of the Women’ s Guild of Arts. Established in 1907 because women were refused entry on the basis of their sex to the Art Workers’ Guild, it became the most prestigious group in the country

5 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT for women ‘designers and workers, principally, though not exclusively, in the applied arts’. 12 Like their male peers, members of the Women’ s Guild of Arts were predominantly middle and upper middle class and from professional, trading, and artistic families. Until at least the late 1920s the Guild fl uctuated around sixty full members, in comparison to the Art Workers’ Guild, which had approximately 240 members. Yet the Women’ s Guild has since been overlooked in all major histories of the Arts and Craft s movement. Th roughout, my focus is the interconnected social worlds of approximately thirty of these women, positioning them amidst the cultural milieu of the era, revealing women art workers to have been central players in the Arts and Craft s movement, and arguing that any history which does not consider their activities is fundamentally fl awed. Th e Women ’ s Guild of Arts functions as a powerful riposte to the repeated assertions that there were few women designers in the English movement. Even Stella Tillyard, who stressed the signifi cance of the wider hinterland of the movement, emphasising that women were active at ‘all … levels’, stated there ‘were few major [female] designers’ (mentioning none by name) and ‘For the most part professional craft swomen simply made what men had designed.’ She also contended there ‘were few female groups which were both professional and visionary’. 13 Th e Women’ s Guild of Arts, however, alongside other groups such as the Lyceum Club, was certainly visionary in its outlook. All members were designers to some extent, they just tended to place less signifi cance on emphasising this specifi c component, largely because they regularly worked across numerous stages of the production process, putting into practice their desire to overturn hierarchies between design and making. As numerous chapters demonstrate, many of these women were still held up as major designers, although there were of course varying opportunities and restrictions from fi eld to fi eld, be it metalwork, sculpture, or textiles. Th e Arts and Craft s movement is challenging to defi ne: designers and makers of ‘Arts and Craft s objects’ and buildings did not conform to any neat, identifi able approach, incorporating a variety of infl uences, and ranging in scale from churches to doorknockers. Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan have discussed how ‘the very word “style”, as applied to historicist revivalism, was anathema to them’.14 As the movement grew in popularity, companies shrewdly latched onto the power of the ‘Arts and Craft s’ to sell their ‘artistic’ stock, but an ‘Arts and Craft s object’ should not be assumed to have been designed or craft ed by a person who held Arts and Craft s ideas.15 Th ere were myriad interconnections between diff erent artistic spheres: art nouveau, aestheticism, or modernism(s). 6 INTRODUCTION

Th e Women’ s Guild of Arts forces us to confront such tensions head on, as it accepted members who worked across many fi elds and with hybrid infl uences. A good example of this tendency is member Pamela Colman Smith, who not only designed the famous Rider-Waite deck of divinatory tarot cards, but also designed sets and costumes for the Lyceum Th eatre, told stories about Jamaican folklore, established the Green Sheaf press, had synesthetic sensibilities (painting visions which came to her whilst listening to music), and immersed herself in Arts and Craft s networks. Like many of her peers, Colman Smith had little interest in neatly conform- ing to one movement or approach, and ultimately sought to construct an immersive new lifestyle, oriented around fi nding inspiration by moving between a variety of stimulating artistic milieus. Such an approach situated women like Colman Smith at the cutting edge of social and cultural change when they were alive, but has subsequently led to a lacuna in scholarship, partially for the reason that these lives and works do not neatly fi t amidst the movement-oriented and disciplinary divides which continue to dominate curatorial decisions and formal scholarship. Despite the diffi culties of adopting a conceptual demarcation of the Arts and Craft s movement, Guild members rhetorically expressed their dedication to such an ideal. Indeed, the Guild was specifi cally founded to promote the centrality of women working in the movement. Reconceptualising the movement to incorporate the centrality of this network of women shatters the traditional periodisation of the Arts and Craft s. At the exact point when women ’ s artistic engagement was rapidly expanding – the Women ’ s Guild of Arts was founded in 1907 – the movement was being dismissed as losing societal relevance by men such as C. R. Ashbee and Eric Gill. Both had anxieties about the state of modern society and strongly believed art workers needed to play a greater social and political role beyond working for (in the words of Ashbee) ‘a narrow and tiresome little aristocracy’.16 But their arguments were also bound up with a chauvinistic apprehension about the movement ’ s transformation to include greater access for women, who were clamouring to express their views and use the movement for their own needs. For men such as Ashbee and Gill, this move beyond the specifi c model of artistic radicalism and authenticity envisaged by the small coterie of middle-class men they knew, and the movement’ s wider societal accessibility, impact, and even populism, by the early twentieth century, inevitably meant a ‘watering down’ of its core ideals. Th e scholarship which has since positioned the Arts and Craft s in relation to such rhetoric has replicated this problem: fl attening women’ s contributions and portraying the movement as the unresolved ideology

7 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

(or even ‘failure’) of a cluster of visionary male ‘Victorian’ architects and designers, a periodisation which neatly follows the ebb and fl ow of the life of William Morris (who died in 1896) and fi ts with the supposed subsequent sweeping dominance of modernism. Nevertheless, this narrative of decline has slowly begun to be counteracted. Tillyard argued that modernism was so ground-breaking in Edwardian England, not because it disbanded the past in a revolutionary manner, but because it grew out of the nineteenth-century roots of the Arts and Craft s movement. Michael Saler went further, arguing that transport administrator Frank Pick, used as a representative of one of ‘Morris’ s followers’ in the interwar era, managed to convince ‘many within the worlds of government, industry, education and art’ at this later date that ‘the cause of art was indeed that of the people’. Others have pointed to the alternative Arts and Craft s communities established across the country well into the 1930s.17 Ultimately, the early twentieth century was not a moment which saw steady decline of interest in the Arts and Craft s in favour of stripped-back ‘modernist’ approaches, at either a ‘High Art’ or a ‘middle-brow’ level, in England. 18 Despite this, even recent histories of modern design tend to position the movement as having ‘lost some of its radical edge by the early twentieth century’. 19 Yet for the multiple generations of women involved, the political potential of the Arts and Craft s was not so much the opportunity to radically overturn class hierarchies, but instead the chance it off ered to disrupt gendered marginalisation in the art world and in society. 20 Several artistic women combined their artistic and political energies in the suff rage campaigns.21 Ultimately, the movement nurtured a space in which a wider cross-section of people, made up predominantly of middle- and upper- middle-class fi gures, could pursue harmonious, collaborative, and creative lives in a modern capitalist world. Th ey created a more fecund landscape in which a younger generation of artistic women could – and did – take centre stage by the 1920s and 1930s. 22 By putting forward these beliefs, women art workers became central players in the formation of a progressive and creative cultural milieu in England, which still interconnected with, and fortifi ed, a wider set of pervasive conservative and hierarchical trends.23 Th e permeable ‘conservative/radical’ nature of the movement is explored in multiple chapters, for instance by revealing the outpouring of nationalistic patriotism and promulgation of stereotyped ideas about ‘English culture’ at many Arts and Craft s exhibitions during the First World War. Furthermore, in practice, women art workers, shaped by their own gendered positions in society, developed a special relationship to ‘popular’ culture which elite male designers oft en scorned, opening up the Arts and Craft s to a more expansive variety of incomes, social backgrounds, 8 INTRODUCTION

and interests. Customers and patrons ranged from fellow artists, suff rage campaigners and supporters of the women’ s movement, antiquarians, the Royal Family, American collectors, and, with increasing regularity, those with smaller incomes.24 Very few people could aff ord an ‘Arts and Craft s house’, but growing numbers could aff ord a brooch, bound book, or piece of pottery. Although the Art Workers’ Guild was dominated by architects, the Women’ s Guild of Arts did not have a single member who chose to be identifi ed as an architect. As such, women art workers were at the vanguard of directing artistic taste and promoting a consumer-friendly model of ‘moral’ commercialism, framed around handcraft ed art for the home (although it is important to note such women also designed and produced all sorts of ‘big’ works not intended for domestic settings: church furniture, murals, panels, memorials, and sculptures). A wide network of alternative, fashionable cultural spaces were established: workshops, studios, homes, exhibitions, and businesses. Where possible, their independently run premises were situated in artistic areas of the city like Chelsea or in fashionable side streets snaking off Oxford Street, but women art workers also established businesses across the country, in areas such as the Lake District and the Cotswolds. Th ey off ered new sites where the public could engage in art away from the museums and grand galleries, or even the new department stores, where it is commonly understood the middle classes viewed, discussed, and bought objets d’art across this era. Outside of the austere context of the Arts and Craft s Exhibition Society – always conceptualised as the public face of the movement – a more informal and interactive Arts and Craft s culture was being constructed, in which women participants were centrally involved. Members of the public thronged to watch women art workers engaging in artistry at their exhibitions and workshops; the press published exhortative pieces by female artists encouraging readers to educate themselves about historical traditions and craft techniques; and the shelves of bookshops and family homes were fi lled with manuals written by women equipping dilettantes and designers alike with the knowledge they needed to pursue craft projects.25 Several of these books continue to be used today by practitioners and hobbyists alike. Drawing on this democratisation of artistic culture, women art workers fashioned roles as authoritative educators and cultural arbiters, tapping into a prevalent contemporary nostalgia for a supposedly more harmonious, pre-industrial world. 26 It was this fl ourishing of cultural activity which shaped the public conception of ‘Arts and Craft s’ and fed the success of an artistic movement which captivated the minds and hearts of larger numbers of people than any other art movement before or since in England.

9 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

Skilled work cultures: the artistic, professional, intellectual, and entrepreneurial

Reconceptualising the Arts and Craft s movement with women positioned centre stage has ramifi cations for the broader understanding of work and ‘professional’ status across this period. Th rough their work and lifestyles, the example of art workers forces a reconsideration of explanatory mechanisms such as the established master narrative of professionalisation which has dominated scholarly understanding since the 1980s. 27 It is well established that the meaning of the term ‘professional’ crystallised aft er the eighteenth century, becoming closely associated with a cluster of occupations which demanded training, qualifi cations, and assertion of expertise, and expanding beyond law, the clergy, and medicine to incorporate fi elds from science to education to art.28 But scholarship routinely focuses on more traditionally recognised fi elds of work, guarded by institutional membership, educational standing, and legal mechanisms, when defi ning professional status – an approach which rarely addresses the fl uidity and rhetorical self-fashioning inherent in many ‘professional project[s]’ (to use sociologist Anne Witz’ s term) which diff erent fi gures engaged in.29 Th is is particularly the case for those working outside of these traditionally recognised fi elds, such as art, where professional status becomes harder to defi ne. Work cultures take us to the heart of how societies have historically constructed ideals of masculinity and femininity, the attempts to engrain gender and class hierarchies within formal structures and institutions, and how diff erent individuals and groups have contested and rejected these binaries and sought to establish new modes of living and working. In recent years, scholars of women and work have shown how professionalisation repeatedly led to women being marginalised or excluded. In science, a growth in female participation brought about reactionary fears of a ‘crisis of impending feminization’.30 Similarly, the increasingly hierarchical process of formal architectural training made it diffi cult for women to become architects by the nineteenth century, in contrast to the eighteenth. 31 Professionalisation oft en imposed a dual block for women. Firstly, they tended to lack institutional capital, through inability to possess key educational qualifi cations. Inequality could be enshrined in the law: for instance, women could not offi cially become lawyers until aft er the 1919 Sex Disqualifi cation (Removal) Act. Secondly, barred entry to certain masculine social groups, women frequently lacked the necessary social capital to advance professionally.32 Concurrently, informal processes of

10 INTRODUCTION

gender discrimination continued to prevail, which stressed the centrality of the maternal, the marital, and the domestic in women’ s lives. Th e arts mirrored these trends. Th e term ‘professional’ was deployed to delineate status in the nineteenth century, particularly in the fi ne arts. Artists grew ever more protective about monopolising access to customers, whilst entry to societies was increasingly restricted, as was the regulation of exhibition displays. Numerous artistic prospects were closed to women: life study was oft en restricted or segregated, as were opportunities to attend specifi c classes.33 Although women – with fi nancial means – attended in ever greater numbers private art schools and co-educational art schools such as the Royal Academy Schools (women were allowed entry from 1860), and the Slade School of Art (established 1871), male fi gures dominated the teaching staff well into the twentieth century. 34 In response to the growth in numbers of women becoming artists, the term ‘amateur’ began to be understood as having disparaging, gendered connotations, persistently associated with women’ s pursuits, despite the ‘gentleman amateur’ historically having been a respectable term for learned men.35 In his 1908 Craft smanship in Competitive Industry , C. R. Ashbee proclaimed that the ‘two forms of competition’ continually ‘strangling the craft s and wasting human life’ were ‘the machine’ but also the ‘lady amateur’ who was ‘perpetually tingling to sell her work before she half knows how to make it’. 36 Yet, strikingly, there has been little scholarship focused directly on the performative model of artistic masculinity being craft ed in the movement, even though certain men repeatedly portrayed Arts and Craft s activities and objects as only becoming ‘authentic’, ‘serious’, and ‘artistic’ through close contact between working-class male makers and the guiding intellect of visionary middle-class male designers. 37 A l t h o u g h Ashbee and many of his peers continually prioritised processes of making over fi nished products, asserting that a return to historic processes of production held the key to restoring integrity and satisfaction to modern society, when women joyfully engaged in such processes they were more likely to be labelled as ‘amateurs’ and subsequently marginalised. Work by women was not seen as having an intrinsic authenticity which, it was felt, best arose out of an exchange between those working-class male makers and the guiding intellect of visionary middle-class designers. Ashbee ’ s own company ultimately failed fi nancially and had to be closed – in noticeable contrast to the commercial successes of many of the women’ s businesses discussed in Chapter 4 – and even though Ashbee’ s biographer admits that high skill and a sense of materials were only ‘present unevenly’ in the work of the Guild of Handicraft , we are

11 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT still deeply invested in Ashbee’ s journey and contributions to English culture.38 Feminist art historical scholarship has devoted considerable energies on trying to delineate what it meant to be a professional woman artist during this era, with much focus on the fi ne arts. Most recently, Nicola Moorby and Maria Quirk claimed that the ‘mark of the professional artist … was the sale of work’.39 Th e art market expanded rapidly during this period, and a craving for fi nancial independence – or sheer survival – and the status wrought by commanding large sums of money meant interactions with the market was an undeniably important factor for many artists. But we should be cautious of restricting artistic professionalisation through prioritisation of a single means of assessment. Framing those women who made a regular income as ‘the professionals’ immediately discounts several prestigious women at the Women’ s Guild of Arts. Training provides no easier answers: although many members did receive some form of art training, having an art education by no means created neat categories of professionals versus non-professionals.40 In personal papers and newspaper columns alike, people heatedly debated the ‘professional’ statuses of artistic women, oft en using contradictory methods of categorisation: alternating between stressing the importance of training, payment, membership of elite groups, regular exhibition habits, the ability of an admired artwork to convey professional status, or a variety of the above. Prioritising one specifi c strand does not take into account the range of strategies ‘successful’ women working across the arts had to navigate in order to be taken seriously, and it misreads the contested ways artistic roles continued to be discussed. Ultimately, there is no single test one can apply to determine if an artist is ‘professional’, nor was there one in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Writer Constance Smedley, who encouraged new professional networks to blossom between women by establishing Lyceum Clubs across the world, refl ected in her 1929 memoir Crusaders about the relationship between the ‘professions’ and literary and artistic work at the dawn of the twentieth century. Smedley stressed that, unlike those ‘headed for safer ground’ in ‘professions that involved a defi nite training at a University or Technical College’, the arts were ‘pursuits in an unfenced borderland’. She hinted at the problems which beset women in these fi elds: ‘in 1902 that shadow was always hanging about the working world and professional bypaths were always on the edge of the abyss. One slip, and you were gone forever.’ಟ41 Yet despite all of this – the institutional restrictions, the suggestions of amateurism, and the ominous pitfalls Smedley alludes to – it was this inherent elasticity, this ability to pursue a range of diff erent 12 INTRODUCTION

‘unfenced borderland[s]’, which made art such an attractive option for women, off ering them opportunities to assert new roles largely outside of the formal restrictions they faced in other professions. Th is was particularly the case in the Arts and Craft s, where women could swift ly gain authority through learning about and adapting historic methods and techniques in fi elds less regulated and hierarchical than the fi ne arts. Weaving throughout these tactics was a vocational ethos characteristic of the arts and the liberal work ethic of the era.42 For Arts and Craft s protagonists, there was no easy divide between living and working. A quasi-religious, fervent belief in the possibilities of forming a new world, where all the arts could be harmoniously enjoyed, fed into all they did. Friendships became artistic networks, homes were turned into studios, and romantic partners were selected because of their artistic commitments. Such attempts to negotiate these new roles actually constituted a complete reimagining of their entire lives. Th is culture was particularly permeable to women, for whom gendered expectations demanded the integration of their domestic and professional lives. In part, demonstrating allegiance to the movement involved per- formatively divesting oneself of overt traces of ‘professionalism’. Many men associated with the Arts and Craft s movement had little interest in portraying themselves in such a way, and in fact made concerted attempts to distance themselves linguistically from the professions due to its implications of overt regulation, uniformity, and ‘the establishment’.43 I n noticeable contrast, Arts and Craft s women were more likely to accept being labelled as ‘professionals’, and indeed were oft en described specifi cally as such by sympathetic social commentators, in a gendered framing rarely used to describe their male peers. 44 Whenever possible, however, they preferred to use descriptive terms such as ‘workers’, ‘designers’, ‘artists’, ‘craft workers’, and ‘art workers’ (oft en prefi xing all these terms with ‘serious’) over ‘professional’ to describe their occupational choices. Th roughout this book, I draw interchangeably from this extensive rhetorical discourse – and take a similar approach to terms such as applied art, craft , decorative, and handicraft – in a manner appropriate to their fl exible and inconsistent usage at the time. Of these, ‘art worker’ and ‘Arts and Craft s’ tended to be the most encompassing and frequently employed in the documentary record. I do, however, still use ‘professional’. Th e specifi c processes Arts and Craft s women (and men) engaged in to assert cultural expertise oft en emulated and interconnected with professionalising currents, such as obsessively regulating access to certain groups and exhibitions. Situating Arts and Craft s networks in relation to wider debates about professionalisation also evokes a discursive world Women ’ s Guild of Arts

13 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT members would have recognised. Press reports about Mary Lowndes ’ s Englishwoman Exhibition of Arts and Handicraft s, for instance, consistently asserted that ‘Only the best professional work is accepted.’ಟ 45 At times, diff erent art workers used this term to signal serious intent, and this was especially the case for women. Facing heightened suspicions due to their gender, women art workers needed to ensure they were perceived to be off ering an alternative to the effl orescence of amateur ‘dabblers’. Keen to remove notions of amateurism, they oft en embedded themselves amidst the women’ s movement, where they were admired as important representatives of pioneering professional women. Both the suff rage campaigns and the women’ s movement facilitated the expansion of new women-centred, politicised spaces for the performance of professionalisation, socialisation, and an avid consumer market. Th e neologism ‘professional’ – and ‘business woman’ – was a specifi c focal point of these empowerment strategies. 46 Th is can clearly be seen at the International Congress of Women conference in 1899, held in London, in the section on ‘Women in Professions’. In the subfi eld of the handicraft s, architect W. R. Lethaby began with a paper discussing the ‘Special Aptitude of Women for Handicraft s’. Subsequently, four leading women agreed to represent their respective fi elds: May Morris provided a paper on needlework, Charlotte Newman on metalwork, Mary Lowndes on stained glass, and Julia Hilliam on woodwork. In her paper, Hilliam asked, ‘Do we realise what an infl uence we have on the taste of the future, as our work lives aft er us?’ಟ 47 She also appeared aggrieved (similarly to C. R. Ashbee) about the many women now making ‘“nice little things for the house and bazaars, but they are only amateurs,” and how we wish there were only half the number’. 48 Th is tendency to diff erentiate themselves as infl uential fi gures in society, who were making history, intersected with a wish to ensure they were defi ned as ‘art workers’ who provided an alternative to trade companies and the mass market. Despite the condescen- sion of Hilliam ’ s dismissal of ‘amateurs’, which was common amongst her network, Hilliam and her female peers were deeply reliant upon this wider sphere of feminine, amateurish interest. It provided both a receptive market and spaces where they could more easily establish and assert their authority. Th roughout this book, I show how women repeatedly asserted expertise across fi elds of activity oft en conceptualised as having been largely separate: moving competently between artistic, professional, intellectual, and commercial spheres, lecturing, exhibiting, designing, making, and writing. Partially due to this approach – at once everywhere and nowhere – art workers have slipped through the historiographical net, having received 14 INTRODUCTION

little analysis from art historians, economic and intellectual historians, gender historians, or historians of work. Arts and Craft s women recalibrated societal and cultural understanding of women in the arts by obfuscating the boundaries between art and craft ; between creativity, the professions, and entrepreneurial intent; between modern and medieval; and between public and private, domestic life. Th e diff erent elements to maintaining one ’ s status as a ‘professional art worker’ was especially benefi cial for women. Th ey did not have to persistently attempt to gain entry to one, tightly controlled world of work, but could instead attempt to make headway by partially participating in a range of diff erent activities. In a similar manner to their refusal to conform to a particular ‘style’, they refused to commit themselves to a particular model of working. Women art workers wholeheartedly embraced these strategies of adopting multiple roles and engaging with diff erent registers of activity. A ‘successful art worker’ could be equal parts culturally authoritative intellectual, business owner, and artistic idealist. For example, Charlotte Newman sought to garner an artistic and intellectual reputation – and to raise the status of goldsmith work – by giving formal lectures for elite male-only art societies, but she also used her commercially profi table jewellery business to assert authority on her own terms, which allowed her discreetly to negotiate access to a receptive market and an international audience clamouring to buy handmade ‘artistic’ and ‘historic’ jewellery. She was portrayed as a celebrity in detailed interviews for the women ’ s and the art press: the Woman ’ s Signal extolled her virtues as ‘far more than the clever businesswoman, or even the skilled worker’. Instead she had been ‘for years a student of ancient history and art … She has exalted the ordinary craft of the jeweller into a fi ne art.’ಟ 49 By weaving their way through these diff erent worlds these fi gures appeared as cultured participants in society, even if such tactics came at least partially from positions of instability. Together, Arts and Craft s women expanded the boundaries of respectability in artistic and work cultures, establishing a series of new pathways through which women could more readily participate, by repeatedly taking advantage of the various ‘unfenced borderland[s]’ available to them.

Artistic equality, the women’ s movement, and the politics of gender Th e second half of the nineteenth century marked a critical period when the women ’ s movement on both sides of the Atlantic resolutely pushed for the expansion of opportunities for women in politics, education,

15 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT civic cultures, and work. As part of this, there was a rapid growth of a women-focused print culture, from feminist advocacy papers such as the Englishwoman’s Review to fashionable publications like Hearth and Home , as well as women ’ s sections in local and national newspapers, alongside books, published lectures, and conference proceedings. 50 By the early twentieth century, the suff rage campaigns saw ever more feminist papers, such as Votes for Women and the Common Cause. All of these diff erent publications promoted women’ s extensive knowledge of household management, home decoration, and fashion, priming a space where women art workers – and women art historians, critics, and interior decorators – could situate themselves as experts, ready to direct the tastes of the ever-growing sector of the public interested in buying ‘artistic’ and ‘historic’ objects. 51 Several women embedded in Arts and Craft s currents asserted that women had special aptitudes for designing and making domestic artwork. E. C. Woodward told readers of Mrs Strang’ s Annual for Girls that jewellery making was ‘perhaps specially suited to women, who, being the chief wearers of jewellery, should know what they want’. 52 Women like Woodward encouraged this interest to amplify their own positions, to further the blossoming of an empowering feminised market framed around women buying art by other women, and to open up a space for the next generation of women to carve out their own successful niche in Arts and Craft s cultures. But the ways women art workers sought to position themselves sat, at times, uneasily with the prominent essentialised rhetoric about woman- hood that was dominating the women’ s movement and the suff rage campaigns. Th readed throughout the women’ s and feminist press was a socially maternalistic view which went beyond framing women as having particular interest in art and fashions for the home. Instead considerable energies were used to position women – and middle-class white women in particular – as having a heightened moral compass, an emotional way of seeing the world, and a yearning for motherhood. Many used this widespread belief to justify the need for women’ s public participation in specifi c national and international political cultures. 53 Pamela Sharpe has labelled this the deliberate creation of a ‘facade’ of gendered femininity and domesticity which has masked the full extent of women’ s involvement in public life. 54 Teaching and nursing were frequently suggested as viable occupations for women because they were viewed as especially nurturing, compassionate positions. Th e applied arts, in particular needlework and jewellery, viewed as repetitive and requiring ‘nimble fi ngers’, were much promoted: middle-class women were already expected to have dabbled in the arts as part of their wider performance of classed femininity. Well 16 INTRODUCTION

into the 1930s, the physical appearance of artistic women in the press continued to be described as feminine, their studios and showrooms as domesticated and pretty, their craft s as dainty and delicate. Editors and journalists still oft en showed great support for women artists, portraying them as celebrity-like fi gures, featuring them in interviews, reviewing their exhibitions, and whetting a supportive public appetite for their work. Th is gendered language featured in all of the leading art journals, alongside local and national newspapers. Th e work of women art workers was discussed with surprising regularity in prestigious art journals like the Studio and the Art Workers’ Quarterly. Although portraying specifi c women as esteemed fi gures, and their work as highly skilled, descriptions were usually brief in contrast to those of their male peers and were frequently – although by no means always – disparagingly gendered in tone, diminish- ing the aesthetic and intellectual contributions of women to the culture of the time. When we turn to consider how Arts and Craft s women sought to articulate their views on questions of art, work, equality, and gender relations we fi nd a rather diff erent strategy being implemented. Rejecting prevalent Victorian ideas about the innate creative diff erences between women and men, they positioned themselves as equally capable of participating in artistic culture, as engaged in the same aesthetic, moral quest as their male peers, and as responsible for resurrecting a wider cultural lineage of design and making which stretched back through history. Women art workers consistently expressed the view that the gender of the artist was irrelevant, and stressed the equal capacity of women and men to produce work of excellent standards. Aft er Lethaby had given his paper on women ’ s ‘Special Aptitude’ for handicraft s at the International Congress of Women conference, Mary Lowndes indirectly responded to him in her paper that it is ‘unprofi table, to talk about any art with relation to the sex of the person who pursues it’.55 Th is egalitarian framing was put forward by many women across the professions, as well as in certain feminist circles: Hertha Ayrton refused to be stereotyped as a ‘woman in science’, instead arguing that her work should be ‘studied from the scientifi c, not the sex, point of view’. 56 Lectures, manuals, articles, even advertisements and calling cards, relating to the working lives of women art workers are all noticeable in their eschewal of a gendered or a feminised framing. Th is approach is exemplifi ed in Edith B. Dawson ’ s commissioned 1906 book Enamels for Methuen. Aside from her name there is little hint of her gender. Dawson focused instead on positioning herself as a serious pioneer, instructing others that if the craft is done ‘with capable hand and brain … we may yet have a school of enamellers equal to, perhaps

17 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT even better than any that the world has seen’.57 Others, such as E. C. Woodward and M. V. Wheelhouse, used initials to disguise their gender. Although collectively women art workers tended to argue against professional distinctions on the basis of sex, individually they espoused a variety of views about women’ s status in society more widely. Rarely explicitly against women getting the vote, they did veer between the apathetic and the fi ercely committed, and oft en prioritised artistic commitments. Some, such as Mary Lowndes, used the suff rage press and their art to self-actualise new political identities, as we shall see in Chapter 5 . Th is could contrast with their professional self-fashioning at other moments. Lowndes wrote in dismay for the Common Cause in 1914 – in an approach which diverges from her wish to avoid the topic at the conference in 1899 – about how ‘women have not shared with men in any sort of equality’ because ‘Women are not free – they have never been free.’ Seeking to rally her fellow campaigners, she emphatically stressed this was now ‘the age of woman’, the moment when women – and women artists in particular – would ‘lead a world-wide revolt against the prejudice and ancient tyranny that … struggle ever to keep woman the inferior creature they proclaim her’. She went on to assert optimistically that she and her artistic peers – using several Women’ s Guild of Arts members as examples – were fi nally starting to carve out a ‘sort of progress towards equality with the sex that has hitherto monopolised to so great an extent the intellectual opportunities of life’. 58 Th ese writings function as a reminder of the need to take care when using print culture to make snap judgements about gender, artistic culture, skilled work, and women ’ s lives. It is important to account for the breadth of viewpoints being expressed on these pages, indicative of wider power struggles in the arts and in society. Furthermore, as Kathryn Gleadle has cogently argued: ‘Statements articulated in public sites of high cultural or political capital could be much more distinctly gendered than the dynamics of interpersonal interaction or the particularities of specifi c social and cultural communities.’ ಟ59 By exploring these views and how they played out within diff erent relationships, contexts, and spaces, Women Art Workers provides a more complete account of how artistic women and men constructed new lifestyles alongside each other. Whilst taking a detailed look at the ongoing centrality of women’ s relationships to the construction and maintenance of such networks, I stress that the lives of women art workers intermeshed with innumerable fi eld-specifi c and classed similarities with their male peers, who oft en played supportive, central roles as co-workers, husbands, family members, and enthusiastic champions of their work. For example, W. R. Lethaby, who spoke at the 18 INTRODUCTION

International Congress of Women conference and later joined the Women’ s Guild of Arts as Honorary Associate, showed considerable encouragement and interest in his female peers. Other men played a crucial role by off ering women paid work or the chance to train at their businesses and workshops. In everyday life, artistic women across the country did not uniformly understand their identities to be defi ned by their gender, did not always feel the need to present their work as feminised to maintain class status, and oft en worked closely with their male peers, perceiving themselves as united disciples of the same movement. Metalworker Edith B. Dawson is usually briefl y described in histories of the movement as having been taught by her husband, but in contemporary writings she is described as working with her husband Nelson, at the studio of the silversmith Alexander Fisher, ‘not as pupils, but as co-workers’, part of a network of artists instrumental in ‘fi nding out a little here and a little there’ because trade jewellers refused to help them. 60 To set up a dichotomous (and fl attening) distinction between women and men would fail to capture the complexities of identity formation, and the fact that those active in the Arts and Craft s movement oft en faced comparable diffi culties which would not have been experienced by those in other professions or walks of life.

Archives in attics: the problem of sources A major challenge in writing a history about Arts and Craft s women is the lack of surviving or accessible artworks. More generally, the work of women artists in public galleries and museums constituted less than 10 per cent of collection material in twentieth-century Britain. 61 Th is undoubt- edly creates diffi culties when trying to use an object-oriented approach. Th e works of the women who feature in these pages have oft en been lost, are behind closed doors in private households, or are inaccessible at museums and galleries, institutions which face considerable funding cuts and oft en prioritise artworks by men, widely believed to be worth more money and to attract larger crowds. One of very few, fl eetingly accessible pieces I have found by a key protagonist of this book, metalworker E. C. Woodward, was a single silver spoon listed for sale by an antique dealer. 62 During her day, Woodward was heralded as epitomising artistic excellence in design and making; was featured in prestigious art journals such as the Studio ; acted as co-owner with Agnes Withers of the metalwork business Woodward and Withers in Notting Hill; and designed and made objects for the Royal Family, theatre companies, and churches around the world (such as a ruby-encrusted orb for St Augustine’ s Priory, South Africa, and a silver chalice with garnets and carbuncles for the English

19 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

Church, San Remo, Italy). Her wide-ranging skills saw her, at various moments, design and make war memorials, university trowels, and badges for the suff rage campaign. She even established the fi rst welding school for women during the First World War.63 Textual archives reveal Woodward’ s peers had similarly rich artistic outputs, making this loss and inaccessibility frustrating. As it stands, feminist art historical scholarship has tended to prioritise women’ s paintings and illustrations. Th e fi ne arts oft en appear to off er clearer answers than craft for those seeking to understand the proto-feminist motivations of historical women. 64 Guild member Emily Ford’ s painting Towards the Dawn (1889) portrayed a woman purposefully fl oating upwards through clouds, face turned towards the light, and leaves one with no doubt about her belief in the need for women-centred political and social reforms. 65 It can be more diffi cult to assess similarly the objects designed and made by women who worked across the arts. Scholarship has instead focused on the tendency for women to work in traditionally ‘feminised’ fi elds such as embroidery and jewellery. Scrutiny of processes of production has revealed the ongoing attempts to encourage contemporary gendered hierarchies of design (male) and making (female). Furthermore, the ephemeral nature of fi elds such as needlework has led to women being omitted from histories, as has the lack of signatures on several pieces, and the tendency for these women to work across diff erent craft s. Women in the Arts and Craft s movement have thus been marginalised by both their gender and their choice of artistic fi eld, during the period they were active, and particularly in later histories of the movement. Cheryl Buckley ’ s 1986 survey of design literature, theory, and practice led her to announce that the omission of women has been so overwhelming that ‘one realises these silences are not accidental or haphazard; rather, they are the direct consequence of specifi c historiographical methods.’ ಟ66 Archiving processes across the twentieth century have indelibly suff used the ways histories are told, leading to certain objects and writings being archived, catalogued, and exhibited for the benefi t of posterity, whilst others have been destroyed or tossed aside. Th is is particularly the case for archives pertaining to the histories of women, which are notoriously fragmentary, routinely subjected to gendered processes of compilation and destruction as artworks which ostensibly are based on ‘worth’ and ‘importance’, but which implicitly preserve the marginalising phenomenon of gendered dismissal. In part because of the scarcity of surviving material, and in part because these objects only allow limited inroads into the ideological conceptualisations, and experiences, of work cultures in this period, Women Art Workers is not ultimately framed around artistic objects 20 INTRODUCTION

or individual biographies, although at certain moments across the following chapters life stories and specifi c works are naturally the subject of targeted analysis. I do not mean to suggest these complex historical objects do not off er copious critical insights, but my interest here as a social and cultural historian is in tracing the textual, visual, and material worlds in which art workers were immersed. Additionally, as Alan Crawford has suggested, for many adherents to the movement, such as C. R. Ashbee ’ s Guild of Handicraft , the ‘aims and ideals of the Guild were not achieved once a fi ne piece of workmanship had been produced – the object was not the object – they were achieved as the workman’ s experiences became more creative’, which it was believed would make ‘the world a better place’.67 Ways of seeing are always shaped by the context in which diff erent objects – and their designers and makers – are situated. In recent years, the discovery of boxes fi lled with documents pertaining to the Women ’ s Guild of Arts in a Hammersmith attic once belonging to the etcher and watercolourist Mary A. Sloane, long-term Honorary Secretary, were gift ed to the William Morris Society by her great-nephew, enabling the story of the Guild fi nally to be told. Th ese hitherto unexamined documents – annual reports, meeting minutes, letters, and ephemera – alongside a large collection of Sloane’ s personal correspondence, provide unprecedented insight into women ’ s associational life in the Arts and Craft s movement predominantly during the years when Sloane was Honorary Secretary: c . 1909–1924. In particular, these boxes contain a wealth of evidence for the, at times fraught, private institutional debates at the height of suff rage militancy, c . 1907–1913, the curious contradiction between the institutional and personal responses of women art workers to suff rage and feminist politics, and the implications of politics on the ways women constructed working lives. Alongside this, Duke University in North Carolina recently purchased (in 2015) a second Women ’ s Guild of Arts archive, which provides a wealth of further details, as it includes over eighty letters between members. Th e personal papers consulted for this project were usually uncata- logued or accessed privately through family descendants. Although on an individual level only glimpses of the lives of women such as E. C. Woodward can be reconstructed, considering these women’ s lives together means I have been able to draw from a surprisingly extensive range of unstudied archival materials. Th ese relatively privileged women have left scattered traces of their strategies of professionalisation across the many diff erent spheres they moved between in their lifetimes. My approach has been to bring together as many visual and written sources as possible, incorporating materials from the press (local, national, and international

21 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT newspapers, art journals, the women’ s press, and suff rage papers), institutional archives, artist manuals, exhibition catalogues, advertisements, posters, postcards, memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, diaries, letters, and calling cards. Th ere is a rich surviving corpus of photographs which provides a further frame of analysis, reiterating the ways women sought to take charge of their self-representation as modern working women through this newly available visual mode. Census, birth, death, and marriage records aided the collection of biographical data. Archival research has taken me across England, to attics in the suburbs of Birmingham, local collections in the Lake District, Wiltshire, and Leeds, to houses once belonging to Women ’ s Guild of Arts members across the country, and on many trips to the Art Workers’ Guild and Women’ s Guild of Arts archives in London. I have visited and used archival materials in international depositories based in locations as far afi eld as San Francisco, Los Angeles, North Carolina, and Cape Town. By bringing together this wealth of materials, this book provides the fi rst history of the cultural and social worlds professional women art workers inhabited, the language and spaces they used to assert their new roles and show off their work, and the impact these individuals, networks, and institutions had on society.

Th e spaces of artistic self-actualisation At the heart of the strategies implemented by women art workers was the spatial remapping of the capital. Th ey set up a network of sites across London through their homes, studios, workshops, businesses, guild halls, clubhouses, and exhibitions. One of the most enduring inquiries into women’ s and gender history over the last forty years has been the examination of the ideology of ‘public and private spheres’, drawing a contrast between men inhabiting the public world of work, and women coming to possess ever-increasing authority in the private world of the home.68 Yet there has been an absence of research into how women – separately and collaboratively – sought to construct and assert new working lives by adapting the range of diff erent spaces available to them into sites framed around material demonstration of their roles as ‘serious’ workers. 69 Building on the work of art historians, historical geographers, and feminist theorists who have sought to untangle how diff erent environments, be these built ‘places’ or conceptualised ‘spaces’, infl uenced political power, social experience, and cultural production, Women Art Workers revolves around a series of thematic chapters focused on the buildings and spaces women art workers repeatedly conceptualised as critical to the formation of their artistic, professional lives.70 Chapter 1 peers into clubhouses and 22 INTRODUCTION

guild halls, Chapter 2 explores the exhibition spaces of the Arts and Craft s, Chapter 3 is based in artistic homes and studios, whilst Chapter 4 assesses businesses and workshops. Th e fi nal chapter, Chapter 5 , focuses on the impact of the suff rage campaigns and the First World War in shift ing the stakes of these professional endeavours. Th e book concludes with an Epilogue which uses the moment women fi nally gained access to the Art Workers’ Guild in 1964 as a heuristic device to complicate simplistic narratives of the steady ‘progress’ of women ’ s opportunities in the arts across the twentieth century. Several analytical threads run across the book: for example, many chapters discuss domesticity as it was positioned as such a central force in these women’ s lives. Of course, these women interacted with other spaces relevant to their working lives such as art school and the church. As revealed in Chapter 4, women business owners played an important role in opening up their specifi c artistic fi elds to the next generation, oft en employing and training women apprentices and staff ; in order not to neatly cut away an ‘educational’ section of these women ’ s lives, these activities will be viewed holistically in numerous chapters. 71 F u r t h e r m o r e , although religious beliefs appear to have rarely been discussed in groups such as the Women ’ s Guild of Arts, on an individual level some artistic women were as much motivated by spiritual dedication as by a need to articulate professional status. 72 Guild members are positioned centre stage throughout this book, but along the way a wide-ranging cast of supporting characters wheel in and out of view: maids and caretakers, supportive (and unsupportive) parents, German art gallery directors, suff rage campaigners, fellow artists, and many – oft en anonymous – journalists, writers, and social commentators. Structuring the chapters around the construction of professional ‘space’ challenges attempts to impose a neat linear history of professionalisation and the formation of clearly defi ned ‘professional identities’. It lays bare the ongoing fi ssures between ideals and praxis, unveiling how women repeatedly tried to navigate and break down binaries of public/ private, medieval/modern, amateur/professional, masculine/feminine, and commercial/artistic. Th e spaces women art workers had access to – and did not have access to – actively shaped and reshaped social dynamics, cultural production, and attempts to claim political power. Th roughout, artistic spaces are shown as important imagined and idealised loci (the ‘artist’ s studio’, the pseudo-medieval ‘workshop’, the ‘guild hall’) in the cultural geography of the city. Th e cosmopolitan capital was a congenial place for artistic women. Propinquity and the urban environment played a central role in the

23 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT performance of artistic roles and how art work was understood. Th e rapid expansion of the metropolis across this era off ered a multitude of unique opportunities for the art workers who lived there: the exhibition scene was vibrant and increasingly diverse, and there were many buildings available to rent in culturally and historically signifi cant areas. By focusing on London across many of the chapters that follow I do not mean to move the lens of inquiry away from the centrality of regional and international elements in the making of the movement, a topic of detailed inquiry in recent years. 73 Instead, I seek to feed into these debates by showing that for many London-based artists – and contemporary fi gures – these activities in the capital played a central role in shaping how such individuals conceptualised their positions, and tried to construct a hierarchy of expertise, framed around the prestige they felt to be conferred on those who lived, trained, and worked there. Th is was the case even whilst London-based art workers idealised the countryside, repeatedly using it for artistic inspiration and spending considerable time in rural communities. Furthermore, the capital simultaneously encouraged specifi c competitive and conservative attitudes to fl ourish, especially in the heartland of masculine artistic culture at institutions such as the Royal Academy, which contrasted with local artistic contexts elsewhere in England, such as the Northern Art Workers’ Guild, which had women on the Committee in the 1890s. Members of the Women’ s Guild of Arts were important interlocutors who benefi ted from, and shaped, diff erent local, national, and international contexts throughout their lives. Th e majority were English and based in the South-East, but several others lived far from London, travelling back and forth for meetings and exhibitions: sculptor and painter Edith Bateson was in Yorkshire, embroiderer Clara Tustain in North Wales, stained-glass worker Ethel Rhind in Dublin, whilst textile worker Annie Garnett was in the Lake District. Based in London, there was a cluster of Irish members, including writer and decorative artist Alys Fane Trotter, painter Rose Barton, Associate member and embroiderer Una Taylor, and Welsh sculptor and medallist Ruby Levick. Th ere was a surprising lack of members from Scotland, likely because of the supportive environment at the Glasgow Society of Women Artists. Some members grew up in mainland Europe, like German calligrapher Anna Simons and Austrian painter Marianne Stokes. Many travelled regularly, spreading knowledge about the movement while advertising their own independent roles: May Morris lectured in North America, Christiana Herringham journeyed to India to copy the frescoes in the Ajanta Caves, Myra K. Hughes wrote about and illustrated her experiences in Palestine for the Studio, whilst 24 INTRODUCTION

Edith Harwood lived in Rome, writing and illustrating the book Notable Pictures in Rome . Others who moved to pursue new opportunities in the capital regularly journeyed back to the areas where they had grown up, to visit family and participate in local art exhibitions, organisations, and cultural events. Th at Women Art Workers is constructed around the diff erent spaces of women art workers’ professionalising strategies stems directly from the fi xation expressed by the women themselves; they repeatedly returned to the impact of space in negotiating acceptability, achieving professional success, and preserving ‘authenticity’. Letters, photographs, memoirs, and the press all reveal the veritable obsession women art workers (and wider society) had with buildings, material environments, and the impact of this upon working lives. Th rough reconstructing these conceptual land- scapes, we can see their world as they built it, and how they sought to disseminate ideas about careful design, gender equality, new forms of labour, and a desire to promote a shared entitlement to participate in cultural life across society.

Across the following chapters I destabilise the traditional notions of a core elite of Arts and Craft s men as fi gures of unrelenting authority and the sole disseminators of radical artistic ideas across this era. Instead I focus on the experiences of an extensive network of Arts and Craft s women as they sought to claim new professional, artistic positions in society, which intersected with a moment of profound social change, and facilitated these attempts to achieve status and acclaim. Such women navigated both new and traditional modes of dissemination: taking advantage of the growth of the capital, middle-class networks, print culture, public interest in the past, the cult of domesticity, and the emergence of celebrity cultures. Th rough this spectrum of approaches, women art workers disseminated the ethos of the movement across new local, national, and international registers, continually moving between, and disrupting, the porous and contested categories of ‘radical, bohemian’, ‘Arts and Craft s’, and ‘popular culture’. I explore how gender both facilitated and hindered opportunities: in enabling the ready assertion of authority and knowledge about art for the home, but persistently associating their work with questionable dilettantism rather than radical masculine craft smanship. Th roughout, I foreground the processes which diff erent women art workers engaged in to construct and maintain nascent professional roles, unveiling the making of modern artistic cultures and the ongoing centrality of gender to the ideals and practice of ‘expertise’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.

25 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

N o t e s

1 www.artworkersguild.org , accessed 19 September 2019. 2 Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: Th e British and Th eir Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Judith A. Neiswander, Th e Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 3 P e t e r S t a n s k y , Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Craft s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 4 Janice Helland, British and Irish Home Arts and Industries, 1880–1914: Marketing Craft , Making Fashion (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007); Janice Helland, ‘“Good Work and Clever Design”: Early Exhibitions of the Home Arts and Industries Association’, Journal of Modern Craft , 5/3 (2012), pp. 275–293. 5 P a m e l a To d d , William Morris and the Arts and Craft s Home (London: Th ames and Hudson, 2012); Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1995); Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 6 Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Review: Th e Arts and Craft s Movement: Handmade Socialism or Elite Consumerism?’, Contemporary Sociology , 16/3 (1987), pp. 388–390. 7 A l a n C r a w f o r d , ‘ Th e Arts and Craft s Movement: A Sketch’, in By Hammer and Hand: Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Birmingham (ed.) Alan Crawford (Birmingham: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1984), pp. 5–26 (p. 8); Lara Platman, Art Workers Guild: 125 Years (Norwich: Unicorn, 2009); Gavin Stamp, Beauty’ s Awakening: Th e Centenary Exhibition of the Art Workers’ Guild, 1884–1984 (Brighton: Brighton Museum, 1984). 8 Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Craft s Movement, 1870–1914 (London: Astragal, 1979); Anthea Callen, ‘Sexual Division of Labor in the Arts and Craft s Movement’, Woman ’ s Art Journal, 5/2 (1984–1985), pp. 1–6; Anthea Callen, ‘Sexual Division of Labour in the Arts and Craft s Movement’, in A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (eds) Judy Attfi eld and Pat Kirkham (London: Women’ s Press, 1989), pp. 151–164. 9 L y n n e Wa l k e r , ‘ Th e Arts and Craft s Alternative’, in A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (eds) Judy Attfi eld and Pat Kirkham (London: Women ’ s Press, 1989), pp. 165–173 (p. 165). 10 Jude Burkhauser (ed.), Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design, 1880–1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990); Elaine Cheasley Paterson, ‘Craft ing a National Identity: Th e Dun Emer Guild, 1902–1908’, in Th e Irish Revival Reappraised (eds) Betsey Taylor FitzSimon and James H. Murphy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), pp. 106–118; Joseph McBrinn, ‘“A Populous Solitude”: Th e Life and Art of Sophia Rosamond Praeger, 1867–1954’, Women ’ s History Review, 18/4 (2009), pp. 577–596; Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: Th e Women of the Canadian Handicraft s Guild (London: Routledge, 1999); Catherine W. Zipf, Professional Pursuits: Women and the American Arts and Craft s Movement (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007). More generally: Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993); Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900 (London:

26 INTRODUCTION

Routledge, 2000); Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’ s Press, 1987); Cheryl Buckley, Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry, 1870–1955 (London: Women’ s Press, 1990); Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland (eds), Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935: Th e Gender of Ornament (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002); Janice Helland, Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth- Century Scotland: Commitment, Friendship, Pleasure (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000); Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: Th e Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 1 1 J a n M a r s h , Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story, 1839–1938 (London: Pandora, 1986); Anna Mason and others, May Morris: Arts and Craft s Designer (London: Th ames and Hudson, 2017); Lynne Hulse (ed.), May Morris: Art and Life, New Perspectives (London: Friends of the William Morris Gallery, 2017). 12 Women ’ s Guild of Arts Archive, William Morris Society, London (hereaft er WGAA), Rules, undated. Zoë Th omas, Founding Members of the Women ’ s Guild of Arts (act. 1907 –c. 1939), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2018. 1 3 S t e l l a T i l l y a r d , Th e Impact of Modernism, 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Craft s Movement in Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 7–9. 14 Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement (London: Th ames and Hudson, 1991), p. 9. 1 5 I m o g e n H a r t , Arts and Craft s Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 1 6 Th is quote from Ashbee’ s memoir is oft en used as evidence that he felt the movement ‘failed’. Rosalind P. Blakesley, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 51. Gill promoted trade unions and the Labour Party over guilds and workshops. He asserted that ‘For everyone, save a few “artist-craft smen” who get some advertisement by exhibiting their wares at Arts and Craft s Exhibitions, the Arts and Craft s movement is now more or less discredited.’ Eric Gill, ‘Th e Failure of the Arts and Craft s Movement: A Lesson for Trade Unionists’, Socialist Review (December 1909), pp. 289–300 (p. 289). 1 7 T i l l y a r d , Th e Impact of Modernism; Michael Saler, Th e Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 177; Annette Carruthers, Edward Barnsley and his Workshop: Arts and Craft s in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: White Cockade, 1992). 1 8 D e b o r a h S u g g R y a n , Ideal Homes, 1918–1939: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Judy Giles, Th e Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Tom Crook, ‘Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, Journal of Modern Craft , 2/1 (2009), pp. 17–32. 19 Most recently Cheryl Buckley, Designing Modern Britain (London: Reaktion, 2007), p. 15. 2 0 Th is is not to deny that many women fused their artistic skills with philanthropic interests and showed considerable commitment to building inter-class relationships. Mary Seton Watts taught clay modelling classes for shoeblacks in London ’ s East End, and several of her peers pursued similar projects. Furthermore, Tara Morton ’ s recent

27 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

scholarship on the Suff rage Atelier has demonstrated that for some Arts and Craft s women, a critique of class hierarchies could be central to their creative work and interests. Tara Morton, ‘“An Arts and Craft s Society, Working for the Enfranchisement of Women”: Unpicking the Political Th reads of the Suff rage Atelier, 1909–1914’, in Suff rage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise (eds) Miranda Garrett and Zoë Th omas (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 65–89. 2 1 L i s a T i c k n e r , Th e Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suff rage Campaign, 1907–1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987); Miranda Garrett and Zoë Th omas (eds), Suff rage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 22 Tanya Harrod ’ s path-breaking book discusses the integral role played by craft swomen in the 1920s and 1930s but the pre-history to this is crucial, as are the many individuals who continued to be embedded within Arts and Craft s networks. Tanya Harrod, Th e Craft s in Britain in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). See also Jill Seddon and Suzette Worden (eds), Women Designing: Redefi ning Design in Britain Between the Wars (Brighton: University of Brighton, 1994). 23 For a productive discussion of the complexities of this ‘conservative/radical dichotomy’, see Amy Palmer, ‘Radical Conservatism and International Nationalism: Th e Peasant Arts Movement and its Search for the Country Heart of England’, Journal of the Social History Society , 15/5 (2018), pp. 663–680. 24 Sculptor E. M. Rope ’ s panels, for instance, were oft en ‘purposely designed to be executed at a low cost and repeated if desired, so that they could be used by others than the very rich’. ‘Sculpture Panels’, Builder (3 December 1898), p. 508. 25 Metalworker E. C. Woodward provides a quintessential example: she educated her readers about the rich historical tradition of enamelling across Asia, India, and Europe alongside practical details about hall-marking and getting licensed. E. C. Woodward, ‘Jewellery and Metal Work’, in Mrs Strang’ s Annual for Girls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 47–53; E. C. Woodward, ‘Enamelling and Hall-Marking’, in Mrs Strang ’ s Annual for Girls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), pp. 82–87. More generally, manuals and books include: May Morris, Decorative Needlework (London: Hughes, 1893); Mary Seton Watts, Th e Word in the Pattern (London: Astolat, 1905); S. T. Prideaux, An Historical Sketch of Bookbinding (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893); S. T. Prideaux, Bookbinders and their Craft (London: Zaehnsdorf, 1903); S. T. Prideaux, Modern Bookbindings: Th eir Design and Decoration (London: Archibald Constable, 1906); Annie Garnett, Notes on Hand-Spinning (London: Dulau, 1896); Eleanor Rowe, Hints on Wood-Carving: Recreative Classes and Modelling for Beginners (London: City and Guilds Institute, 1891); Eleanor Rowe, Practical Wood-Carving: A Book for the Student, Carver, Teacher, Designer, and Architect (London: Batsford, 1907); Edith B. Dawson, Enamels (London: Methuen, 1906); Mary Lowndes, Banners and Banner Making (London: Artists’ Suff rage League, 1909); Elizabeth Ellin Carter, Artistic Leather Work (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1921). Th ere were even collaborative all- women collections such as Some Arts and Craft s (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903). Th is had a chapter by Elinor Hallé on ‘Th e Art of Enamelling’ and Maria Reeks on woodcarving. 2 6 P a u l R e a d m a n , ‘ Th e Place of the Past in English Culture, c . 1890–1914’, Past and Present, 186/1 (2005), pp. 147–199; Rosemary Mitchell, ‘A Stitch in Time? Women, Needlework, and the Making of History in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture , 1/2 (1996), pp. 185–202. 28 INTRODUCTION

27 Most famously, Harold Perkin, Th e Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989). 28 David Crook, ‘Some Historical Perspectives on Professionalism’, in Exploring Profes- sionalism (ed.) Bryan Cunningham (London: Institute of Education, 2008), pp. 10–27; Penelope J. Corfi eld, Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 1995). 29 Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 5. Celia Davies, ‘Th e Sociology of Professions and the Professions of Gender’, Sociology , 30/4 (1996), pp. 661–678. In 2015 Gillian Sutherland emphasised the unstudied ‘mass presence’ of middle-class working women in their thousands: ‘If we are looking for signs of real change in the labour force and in social structures, they deserve much fuller scrutiny than hitherto they have received.’ Gillian Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 161. 30 Leslie Madsen-Brooks, ‘A Synthesis of Expertise and Expectations: Women Museum Scientists, Club Women and Populist Natural Science in the United States, 1890–1950’, Gender and History , 25/1 (2013), pp. 27–46 (p. 27). 31 Ethel Charles became the fi rst woman member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the foremost professional body for architecture, in 1898. Her sister and architectural partner Bessie Charles joined in 1900. Elizabeth Darling and Lynne Walker, AA Women in Architecture, 1917–2017 (London: Architectural Association, 2017). 32 Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson, ‘Introduction: Middle-Class Women and Professional Identity’, Women ’s History Review, 14/2 (2005), pp. 165–180; Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson, ‘Introduction: Women’ s Work, a Cultural History’, in Women and Work Culture: Britain c. 1850–1950 (eds) Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–24. 33 For a useful discussion about the persistent organisation of nineteenth-century art training around ideas of gendered diff erence (with Glasgow School of Art providing a notably progressive contrast), see Cherry, Painting Women , pp. 53–64. 3 4 Th ere were of course certain exceptions. Eleanor Rowe was described as ‘Twenty Years Manager of the School of Art Wood-Carving, South Kensington’ on the title page of Eleanor Rowe, Practical Wood-Carving: A Book for the Student, Carver, Teacher, Designer, and Architect (London: Batsford, 1907). 35 Using the census to assess patterns of women’ s work can be problematic (such work was oft en not captured), but there was clear growth across this era. In 1851, there were approximately 934 women artists, whereas by 1911 there were at least 8,923. For males: in 1851, there were 9,175 and in 1911, 27,423. Data kindly supplied by Harry Smith and extracted from K. Schürer, E. Higgs, A. M. Reid, and E. M. Garrett, Integrated Census Microdata, 1851 –1911 , version 2 (2016), UK Data Service, SN: 7481. 3 6 C . R . A s h b e e , Craft smanship in Competitive Industry (Campden: Essex House Press, 1908), pp. 37–38. 37 Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge (eds), Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000); John Potvin, Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870–1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). See also Andrew Stephenson, ‘Leighton and the Shift ing Repertoires of “Masculine” Artistic 29 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

Identity in the Late Victorian Period’, in Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (eds) Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1999), pp. 221–247. For specifi c focus on craft see Freya Gowrley and Katie Faulkner, ‘Making Masculinity: Craft , Gender, and Material Production in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies , 14/2 (2018), pp. 1–10. 3 8 A l a n C r a w f o r d , ‘ Th e Object is Not the Object: C. R. Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft ’, in Pioneers of Modern Craft : Twelve Essays Profi ling Key Figures in the History of Twentieth-Century Craft (ed.) Margot Coatts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–11 (p. 9). 3 9 Th e quote is by Nicola Moorby, ‘Her Indoors: Women Artists and Depictions of the Domestic Interior’, www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/ nicola-moorby-her-indoors-women-artists-and-depictions-of-the-domestic-interior-r1104359 , accessed 19 September 2019. Quirk ’ s doctorate concluded that women painters and illustrators reached professional status through paid interactions with the market. Maria Quirk, ‘Reconsidering Professionalism: Women, Space and Art in England, 1880–1914’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2015). 40 Several women in the Arts and Craft s movement fi rst met at the Slade. See Charlotte J. Weeks, ‘Women at Work: Th e Slade Girls’, Magazine of Art (January 1883), pp. 324–329. 4 1 C o n s t a n c e S m e d l e y , Crusaders: Reminiscences of Constance Smedley / Mrs Maxwell Armfi eld (London: Duckworth, 1929), p. 56. 42 Peter Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Joyce Senders Pedersen, ‘Victorian Liberal Feminism and the “Idea” of Work’, in Women and Work Culture: Britain, c. 1850–1950 (eds) Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 27–47. 43 Many were architects, infl uenced by an 1891 Registration Bill which proposed that only those who had offi cially qualifi ed through examination should have the right to use the title ‘architect’. Th is provoked disagreement from those identifying as ‘art- architects’ as they felt architecture would lose its inherent creativity if the Bill was applied, unlike the ‘professional-architects’ who had proposed the measure. See the series of letters in Th e Times from A. W. Blomfi eld and others, ‘Architecture – A Profes- sion or an Art?’, Th e Times (3 March 1891), p. 9. Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock, Architecture, Art or Profession? Th ree Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 61–62. 44 Constance Smedley repeatedly described members of the Lyceum Club – which included many Arts and Craft s women – as ‘professional workers’. Smedley, Crusaders, p. 69. Articles in the press also regularly described women working across the arts as professionals, see H. H. R., ‘Art as a Profession’, Englishwoman ’s Review (16 October 1893), p. 274. 4 5 ‘ Th e “Englishwoman” Exhibition’, Common Cause (17 September 1915), p. 295. 46 See various examples such as ‘An Interview with a Successful Business Woman’, Woman ’ s Signal (11 March 1897), p. 154 and ‘Every Girl a Business Woman’, Girl ’ s Own Paper (2 October 1886), p. 5. 47 Ishbel Maria Hamilton-Gordon (ed.), Women in Professions: Being the Professional Section of the International Congress of Women, London, July 1899 (London: Fisher Unwin, 1900), p. 201. 48 Ibid., p. 199. 30 INTRODUCTION

49 Sarah A. Tooley, ‘A Lady Goldsmith’, Woman’ s Signal (9 May 1895), p. 289. 50 Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 5 1 H i l a r y F r a s e r , Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 52 Woodward, ‘Jewellery and Metal Work’, p. 47. 53 Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, ‘Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920’, American Historical Review , 95/4 (1990), pp. 1076–1108. 54 Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Women ’ s Work: Th e English Experience, 1650–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 10. 55 Hamilton-Gordon (ed.), Women in Professions , p. 195. 56 Claire Jones, ‘Th e Laboratory: A Suitable Place For a Woman? Gender and Laboratory Culture around 1900’, in Women and Work Culture: Britain, c. 1850–1950 (eds) Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 177–194. Th is example is taken from Cowman and Jackson ’ s ‘Introduction’, p. 16. Italics in original. 5 7 E d i t h B . D a w s o n , Enamels (London: Methuen, 1906), p. 198. 58 Mary Lowndes, ‘Genius, and Women Painters’, Common Cause (17 April 1914), p. 31. 5 9 K a t h r y n G l e a d l e , ‘ “ Th e Riches and Treasures of Other Countries”: Women, Empire and Maritime Expertise in Early Victorian London’, Gender and History, 25/1 (2013), pp. 7–26 (p. 19). 60 Jean Hadaway, ‘Developments in the Art of Jewellery’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts , 56 (1908), pp. 287–297 (p. 289). 6 1 K a t y D e e p w e l l , Women Artists Between the Wars: ‘A Fair Field and No Favour’ (Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 8. 6 2 Th e antique dealer, Peter Cameron, is based in Chancery Lane, London. 63 Several articles in the women ’ s press discuss the suff rage badges Woodward produced at her workshop. See for instance ‘Presentation to Miss I. O. Ford’, Common Cause (30 May 1913), p. 120. Th ere is a fi le at Bushey Museum, Hertfordshire, about E. C. Woodward which lists many of her artistic commissions. 6 4 Th ere are of course notable exceptions to this which have illuminated the politics inherent in the processes of design and making. See in particular Rozsika Parker, Th e Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women ’ s Press, 1984). 6 5 Th e painting is now lost but there is a photograph in Cherry, Beyond the Frame , p. 199. 66 Cheryl Buckley, ‘Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design’, Design Issues , 3/2 (1986), pp. 3–14 (p. 3). 6 7 C r a w f o r d , ‘ Th e Object is Not the Object’, p. 9. 68 In the last twenty years there has been a move to explore the intricacies of lived practices, which rarely stood up to prescribed norms. Delap and others have reasoned it makes no sense to set up ‘separate spheres’ as ‘a theory whose only utility lies in the insights we can develop by disproving it’. Th ey instead encourage examination of how ‘the rhetoric of domesticity operated and was made meaningful in particular contexts, how contemporaries used it to make sense of their experiences, how it shaped the actions of particular individuals or groups, and how it changed over time’. Lucy 31 WOMEN ART WORKERS AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

Delap, Ben Griffi n, and Abigail Wills, ‘Introduction’, in Th e Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (eds) Lucy Delap, Ben Griffi n, and Abigail Wills (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–24 (pp. 11–12). ‘Social borderland’, coined by Anne Digby, elucidates how women could, and did, act outside of the immediate private sphere without being challenged – although they tended to need to employ a discrete demeanour. Anne Digby, ‘Victorian Values and Women in Public and Private’, Proceedings of the British Academy , 78 (1992), pp. 195–215. 69 Lynne Walker ’ s path-breaking research provides a rare exception here. Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London, 1850–1900’, in Women in the Victorian Art World (ed.) Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 70–85; Lynne Walker, ‘Home and Away: Th e Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London’, in Th e Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (eds) Iain Borden and others (London: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 296–311. 70 Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, and Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn’, Women ’ s History Review , 21/4 (2012), pp. 523–532; Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: Th e Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth (eds), Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 (London: Ashgate, 2007). 71 For a useful recent discussion see Patricia Zakreski, ‘Creative Industry: Design, Art Education and the Woman Professional’, in Craft ing the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain (eds) Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 145–166. 72 Religion was meaningful on both a personal and professional level to women like Quaker Edith B. Dawson and Emily Ford, who was brought up a Quaker before converting to Anglicanism. Lynne Walker, ‘Women and Church Art’, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design , 3 (2010), pp. 121–143. 73 Elizabeth Cumming and Nicola Gordon Bowe, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Dublin and Edinburgh, 1885–1930 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998); Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006); Annette Carruthers, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Scotland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Paul Larmour, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Ireland (Belfast: Friar ’ s Bush, 1992); Vera Kreilkamp (ed.), Th e Arts and Craft s Movement: Making it Irish (Chestnut Hill: McMullen Museum, 2016); Judith A. Barter, Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Craft s from Britain to Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Alan Crawford and Wendy Kaplan, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World, 1880–1920 (London: Th ames and Hudson, 2004); Jennie Brunton, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in the Lake District: A Social History (Lancaster: University of Lancaster, 2001); Barrie Armstrong and Wendy Armstrong, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in the North East of England: A Handbook (Wetherby: Oblong Creative, 2013); Barrie Armstrong and Wendy Armstrong, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in the North West of England: A Handbook (Wetherby: Oblong Creative, 2005); Barrie Armstrong and Wendy Armstrong, Th e Arts and Craft s Movement in Yorkshire: A Handbook (Wetherby: Oblong Creative, 2013).